Going through the motions

Denniss Hassell as Marlon Brando as Don Corleone, raging against casinos at the Executive Committee.

At a certain point, even the gimmicks become predictable. When a man slips into character as the Godfather to deliver a speech broadly comparing the gambling industry to organized crime, yes, it's a highlight. But it's not a surprise.

At meetings like today's Executive Committee session on casinos - a marathon toil, ostensibly held to give the public an opportunity to directly address their elected representatives on the subject - we slip into our respective roles far too easily.

The left-wing councillors ask passive-aggressive questions of the business deputants. The right-wing councillors ask passive-aggressive questions of the activist deputants.

The puffy, suited lobbyists run through their PowerPoint presentations. The engaged, grassroots citizens share a combination of personal stories, cited statistics, and earnest pleas. And the media sits in a single row, far off to the side, wondering to ourselves who will be the first speaker to cry.

It certainly doesn't help that the outcomes, at the committee stage and at City Council, are foregone conclusions on this particular matter. (The casino issue will sail through Exec, on its way to a drawn-out but spectacular death at Council.) So much passionate sincerity gets crunched up and spit out as so much performance.

And so we all wait for a rupture: something that will jolt us from our cynical stupour, to remind us why all this is worthwhile.

The explosions in Boston, just before 3 pm, slowly sucked us in, one by one. Paying attention to the Executive meeting became more difficult, as the photos and videos and tweets and liveblogs dripped out a succession of horrific and hypnotic details.

In these moments, following the breaking news of an immediate tragedy, nothing else seems really important; the rest of life comes across as superficial theatre.

A member of the public, sitting on the floor next to me, sees my computer screen, and I explain what happened. She rushes out of the room to call her parents, who are in Boston.

When she returns, she tells me her parents were just two blocks away. They're okay, thank goodness, but they witnessed the "huge fireball."

She sits back down on the floor, and tries to keep following the meeting, but seems pretty broken up. I am, too.

"The first thing that comes to mind is your family and your friends, and everything that you've really worked for and strived for in a personal way," said Giorgio Mammoliti, much earlier in the day, with regard to his recent emergency brain surgery. He was back at City Hall today, though only briefly, for the first time following his hospitalization.

Mammoliti is someone for whom politics has long since become a game. More than any other councillor, he's someone who puts on a show that veers between the winking and the insane. Today, however, he seemed humbled, and that itself was humbling. I didn't know what I could ask him in the scrum, that would respect the experience he recently went through.

Every day at City Hall is a different adventure: a different quest through the weighty, the ridiculous, and the mundane. It is a distinct, separate, heightened state of reality. A bubble. But it is in this context that our municipal decisions get made, that the future of our city is decided, and in which the role of government in helping or hurting the vulnerable is determined. It is both more and less real than anything else.

Shortly after 5:30, Mayor Rob Ford announced he'd be giving a short statement concerning the "shocking attack in Boston."